The genius of Spalding Gray: mining his life to find a universal connection

I first saw Spalding Gray do his thing in 1980, at an experimental theater festival in San Francisco. Most in attendance had never caught the lanky, silver-haired monologuist in action but had heard he was a genuine stage original.

After sitting at a small table, glancing at a notebook and sipping water, the seemingly unassuming Gray met expectations — and then some. He spun a hilariously observant and quirky tale about a coastal California journey that had us all spellbound and howling.

I last saw Spalding Gray perform in 2001, at the Bumbershoot Festival. Looking thin and fragile after being badly injured in a car crash in Ireland weeks earlier, he was clearly in a diminished state — and yet, still riveting to a Seattle crowd encouraging him on.

Now Gray is gone, in an apparent suicide by drowning at age 62. (His body was recovered from New York's East River on March 7.) Much has been written about this tragedy, and the post-traumatic clinical depression that led up to it following that Irish auto wreck.

But Gray also deserves untainted consideration of his remarkable three decades as a major theater artist and an inspiration (consciously and indirectly) to scores of other solo spielers — from Eric Bogosian to Anna Deavere Smith, Tim Miller to Sandra Tsing Loh.

For reasons obvious and subtle, I was an avid Gray-watcher. I followed his work closely, interviewed and wrote about him over many years, and sensed he wasn't simply what he may have appeared to be: an exhibitionist gut-spiller eager to share with strangers the most intimate details of his crazed, free-wheeling life.

Certainly his own experiences fueled the 17 monologues (and sole novel, "Impossible Vacation") that constitute Gray's magnum opus — a kind of long-running, memoir-in-progress.

And yes, he broke some stage taboos (and validated certain baby-boomer sensibilities) by candidly mining his own adventures, terrors, relationships, joys and tragedies for material.

Dubbed "the WASP Woody Allen," thanks to his native Rhode Island accent, Yankee good looks and ample neuroses, Gray kept very little about himself off-limits for public airing: not the details of his sexual escapades (discussed in "Booze, Cars and College Girls," and elsewhere), nor his mother's depression and suicide (recounted in ensemble pieces with the avant-garde Wooster Group), nor his dumping of a long-time lover for another woman ("It's a Slippery Slope").

Prior to his death, Gray was toiling on "Life, Interrupted," a new work reflecting on his recent physical and mental travails. (He was set to perform it at Seattle's Moore Theatre this month.)

But chronic angst and self-absorption were not what made Gray a genius — any more than Virginia Woolf's bouts of mental illness made her a great writer.

Actually, Gray's seemingly straightforward onstage confessions were the well-honed products of vivid reportage, artistic rigor and such innovations as his nearly intangible, postmodern melding of artifice and reality.

As he explained to me, Gray painstakingly wrote, edited, paced and polished each of his monologues. A well-trained and versatile actor, with many other stage and film roles to his credit, he also honed the delivery of every line in his texts, choosing vocal rhythms, pauses, emphases, facial expressions for effect.

Widely read and culturally sophisticated, Gray was (like Woody Allen) a questing intellectual — not a screwball naif. He called his art a form of "poetic journalism."

Spalding was indeed the protagonist (and/or fall guy) at the heart of every tale. But this tragicomic narrator was a finely wrought persona, not entirely like the quieter, more circumspect offstage Spalding. Moreover, onstage he also served as a viewfinder for his audience, giving them access to a lively panorama of remarkable characters, situations and contradictions.

In "Gray's Anatomy," about his search for a cure for an eye condition threatening his sight, Gray led us through a wild maze of the shamans, healers and quacks one might resort to in desperation — like the Filipino fake he termed "the Elvis Presley of psychic surgeons."

And in Gray's "Monster in a Box," he depicted a trip to Nicaragua in the 1980s with a group of L.A. celebs, wittily updating Thomas Wolfe's vision of "radical chic." (These VIPs showed their solidarity with the Sandinistas by dressing down; Gray crowned them "the sandalistas.")

Gray's engrossing yarns were, in fact, never just about himself, but about "a self among others" in a crowded age riven with interpersonal, intersecting temptations, conundrums and absurdities.

"Swimming to Cambodia," seen at Seattle's On the Boards in 1985, was surely Gray's most ambitious merging of "self" and "other," personal and political.

In his tale of working as an actor in the 1984 film "The Killing Fields," Gray adeptly layered on-set gossip with Ugly American scenes of raunchy Thailand tourism, and a wrenching history of the Khmer Rouge reign of terror in Cambodia. With "Swimming," Gray quipped, "I've gone from personal neurotic to world psychotic." It was more like a journey from planetary bystander to world citizen.

By contrast, Gray's final completed show, "Morning, Noon and Night," a 1999 chronicle of his domestic life with two young sons and wife Kathie Russo, transcended narcissistic insularity in other ways. By plumbing a "day in the life" of a late-blooming family man for surreal humor and common resonance, he uncovered universal feelings and fears.

The piece ended with shivers of mortality amidst domestic happiness, distilled in an epitaph Gray read on a gravestone: "It's a fearful thing to love what death could touch."

Death has claimed Spalding Gray. But lest we forget: It was a keen attentiveness to life that helped make his art so special.

Misha Berson: mberson@seattletimes.com